Dominic Cummings turns to Prussians to tackle Russian allegations

Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the referendum winning Vote Leave organisation, has responded to the latest claims that some of his fellow Brexiteers had extensive links to Russia.

But he's turned to a pair of Prussians to explain himself.

In his latest typically wordy blog Cummings accused The Observer, which continues to raise questions around the integrity of the Brexit vote, of "inventing stuff..including loony conspiracy theories" before writing that "the Establishment's OODA loops are broken" and publishing two lengthy quotes, one from founder of modern Germany Otto von Bismarck on politics and another from Carl von Clausewitz in a post-script.

He highlighted a line from Bismarck which reads "One's enemies one can count on - but one's friends!" followed by 200 words of Clausewitz's thoughts on warfare.

He also made reference yet again to his 'branching histories' theory to claim that if the Brexit referendum had been held in 2017 Remain would have won.

It was reported in the Sunday papers that Arron Banks, Ukip supporter and main funder for the Leave.EU group, had a number of meetings with top Russian officials. In his book The Bad Boys of Brexit he'd claimed to only have had one 'boozy lunch' with the Russian ambassador. However journalist Isabel Oakeshott who ghost wrote the book for Banks revealed at the weekend that she had a cache of hundreds of emails that showed more meetings were held.

Banks, who is set to be grilled by MPs about the links tomorrow, has dismissed suggestions he made money from the links as 'garbage'.

Cummings took the opportunity to settle some scores. He called on those leading Leave campaigners who tried to get him ousted from his post in 2016 to apologise. He claimed that he'd warned the plotters, who were apparently keen to team up with Banks and Nigel Farage's Leave.EU, that they would "destroy the credibility" of the offical campaign. But he praised his fellow Vote Leave staff for showing "moral courage under pressure" in resisting the coup attempts. He claimed that Remain would have won 60-40 if Vote Leave and Leave.EU had joined forces. He also said Banks' role was "trivial" but that Leave would have won by a bigger margin if "he'd been dropped down one of his defunct mines in summer 2015".